Progress Reported In Foster Education

As the Broward School District polishes an ambitious plan to improve the education of foster children, the reviews so far are mixed, but generally positive.

The district is preparing a report for a foster-care summit to be held on July 27. Most of the changes revolve around better and faster identification of foster children -- and identifying when they need special education, counseling or other services.

"Obviously, we have a long way to go, but the key is that we are continuing to work together," said Jim Notter, the Broward County school official who heads a committee of officials from the school district and the Department of Children & Families to study the problems of foster children. "The committee absolutely forced people to sit at a table and resolve and solve problems."

Most foster children -- about 75 percent, according to some studies -- need some form of special education. Their rates of truancy, behavior problems and failure at academics make them prime targets for dropping out of school and dropping into criminal behavior, studies say. Less than half of them graduate from high school.

For more than two years, child advocates have criticized the school district and the DCF for allowing some children to go for years without receiving that help, which is mandated by federal law.

Many of those cases did not come to light until lawyers sued DCF on the children's behalf last October. Broward judges ordered the school district to provide services and to name educational surrogates, the adult advocates who represent foster children in meetings with teachers and counselors.

Child advocates also pointed out that the number of surrogates was woefully low -- in Broward County last year there were less than 10 surrogates trained to handle about 1,000 foster children, and one of them was one of the lawyers.

Since then, the task force has trained at least nine more surrogates and is recruiting more, according to the task force report.

Fort Lauderdale parent activist Roz Perlmutter, who has recruited surrogates at a number of community groups, said she is mostly pleased with the increase in the number of surrogate parents in Broward County, which she estimates at nine, with a backup list of more on call.

However, she expects that her surrogates will be even busier if the school district is successful in identifying more foster children who need special education.

"There are at least 900, and those are the ones we know about. There are probably more that will surface after having been identified in the classroom or by a social worker. But I really feel confident that people in Broward County will come forward."

The foster-care task force began meeting in January to improve practices that can help keep foster children from falling through the cracks. One of the first problems they encountered was the wide disparity between DCF and school district records, which child advocates had also criticized for being out of date. Last year, estimates of the number of foster children varied widely, from 900 to 1,800. In January, DCF turned over a list of 1,190 names of foster children to the school district.

Now, plans are to update that list electronically, possibly as often as once a month, according to Notter.

The sad fact of life for foster children is that their whole lives can change in a month's time.

But knowing a child has been moved to a new foster home, for example, can trigger a school guidance counselor to talk to the child before his grades start to plummet, Notter said. In the past, keeping track of foster children in the school system was slow. It sometimes took months after a child transferred for records to catch up.

"We're half-way there," Notter said. "We need to be all-the-way there. Then a school guidance counselor can work with that child right away."

Current information also will help school officials arrange for bus transportation so that foster children can stay in the school they started in, rather than transferring to a new school and further disrupting their lives. In lawsuits against DCF, attorneys have identified dozens of children who changed schools several times a year because they were moved.

"This is essential in these children's lives," Notter said. "School could be the only stable influence." Although he is generally upbeat about the changes in Broward County, child advocate attorney Bernard Perlmutter, no relation to Roz, said the school district needs to refine its definition of surrogate parents, which he said flies in the face of federal law.

"They are trying, but there are some real deficiencies," said Bernard Perlmutter, who runs the Child and Youth Law Center at the University of Miami.

A draft of the new Broward County policy, issued on Friday, says that a surrogate parent need not be appointed unless a foster parent has more than four children in the home. Perlmutter says that is wrong, and that each foster child in such a home might need a surrogate other than the foster parent.